Adam Henry: Parts to a Whole

Opinion
  Installation view, photo credit: Charles Benton.
Adam Henry, Installation view, photo credit: Charles Benton. Courtesy of Candice Madey gallery

Amongst a burgeoning market of retrograde art practices there runs an undercurrent of artists seeking to establish for art and its practices a new sustainable identity as a means of inquiry. What made his work different was that he was using painting as a platform primarily to explore the subjectivity and semiotics of perception—the polarity between painting as an optical event and a conceptual one. Taking his vocabulary from color theory, systemic and color-field painting, and cognitive science, his work focused on the difference between what a thing (materially) is and what it may descriptively represent. As with those works, Henry in his present exhibition at Candice Madey Gallery rejects at every turn the cult of individual expression, the magical thinking of transcendence, the pervasive appeal of accessibility, and spectacle. Instead with his present body of works, he reasserts his ambition is to use art as a means to engage his audience in speculative thought and self-reflection.

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Holly Wong: Guardian of the Spirits

Featured Artist
Installation views, photo courtesy of Wes Magyar

Holly Wong’s solo exhibition Guardian of the Spirits at the Curfman gallery, Colorado State University at Fort Collins, combines sewn patchwork of silk, organza, other transparent materials, and drawings—to memorialize her mother whom she lost to alcoholism and domestic violence. The text for her show says that the installation is a “prayer for revolt against the limiting notions of beauty and body size.”

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Susan Hoffman Fishman in Burning Worlds

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Susan Hoffman Fishman, The Earth is Breaking, Beautifully VII: Dead Sea Sinkholes, acrylic, oil pigment stick, cyanotype and mixed media on paper, 51” x 51,” 2023

Susan Hoffman Fishman is an artist who has addressed climate change for many years both in context of her own work as an artist and in her writing on other artists’ work in that arena. Hoffman was first interviewed with Burning Worlds about four years ago and has recently been interviewed there again on her latest series of paintings depicting coastline sink holes and other landscapes impacted by climate change,

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Liz Collins in DUMBO Open Studios

Featured Artist

Liz Collins in her studio. Photo by Joe Kramm.

Each spring over 100 artists and art organizations in DUMBO And Vinegar Hill open their studio doors to the public for a weekend. This year the event takes place on April 22 and 23 from 1 to 6 PM. Art Spiel created a Mixed Media Guide for this event in addition to other curated guides on the Art In Dumbo website here. In conjunction with the event Art Spiel conducted a few interviews with individual participating artists. This one is with Liz Collins whose multi- faceted art includes textiles, drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation.

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A Conversation with Curators of Pro-Ukrainian Exhibit Sovereignty Reimagined

Sovereignty Reimagined. Installation view, Maenad Collective, NY, US © photo by Alex Faoro. From left to right: Jaroslav Pobezhan, Marina Naprushkina, Dana Kavelina, Serhiy Popov, Daria Maiier x Äsc3ea.

Pro-Ukrainian video art from antiwarcoalition.art (https://antiwarcoalition.art/) curated by Alex Faoro, Maxim Tyminko and Aleksander Komarov both members of The International Coalition of Cultural Workers In Solidarity with Ukraine were on view in the group exhibition Sovereignty Reimagined March 18-24, 2023 at Maenad Collective in Brooklyn.

With artists: Oksana Chepelyk (UA), Helena Deda & Alex Faoro (US), Daniil Galkin (UA), Uladzimir Hramovich And Lesia Pcholka (BY), Zhanna Kadyrova (UA), Anton Karyuk (UA), Dana Kavelina (UA), Daria Maiier x Äsc3ea (UA), Elturan Mammadov (AZ), Metasitu (GR), Vladimir Miladinovic (RS), Marina Naprushkina (DE), Valentyna Petrova (UA), Iaroslav Pobezhan (UA), Serhiy Popov (UA), Mykola Ridnyi (UA), and Igor Sevcuk (NL).

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Rachael Wren: Site Lines at The Shirley Project Space

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Rachael Wren: Site Lines at The Shirley Project Space, March 2023installation view. Photo courtesy of Kate Glicksberg.

The Shirley Project Space in Brooklyn is a sympathetic environment for Rachael Wren’s Site Lines, a solo exhibition of six paintings and an unexpected site-specific installation. With two large windows on street level, the gallery’s abundant natural light heightens the relationship between the paintings and the outside world. This bright and airy effect is amplified by the minimalist architecture and tall ceilings, leaving the artist’s painted trees room to grow, an illusion propelled by the restrained installation which leaves ample space around each work.

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Dana Yoeli: Staging Memorials

Dana Yoeli in her Tel Aviv studio, 2022, photo by Roni Cnaani

In her installations, sculptures, and drawings, the Tel Aviv based artist, Dana Yoeli, digs into collective and biographical memories, to create multi-layered environments which prompt us to discover a rich array of interconnected references—from theater and cinema to history, place, and architecture. In Yoeli’s visual universe the “I”, “we”, and “they” entangle to form a new entity, offering us complex shifting perspectives.

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William Norton – Styx & Stones- at The Boiler – ELM Foundation

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“Cop,CodPiece, and Tigger”, “Lurking Cop”, “Cutting the Head Off the Thug”, “in the rain i feel myself swallowed, savored, teased by your tongue”

William Norton’s large-scale paintings at The Boiler – ELM Foundation evoke imagery of oppression and protest through gestural graphic marks and bold color on recycled vinyl advertisements as canvas. “We are always being sold something in this age of hyper-ventilating propaganda. And there is just enough of the advertising image left over to titillate the viewers’ eyeballs,” Norton says.

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Finding My Folk at Old Stone House

Featured Project
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L to R: Ai Campbell, Carl Hazlewood, Angelica Bergamini, Damali Abrams, Carl Hazlewood, Angelica Bergamini, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow and Blanka Amezkua (center).

Finding My Folk, curated by independent curator Krista Scenna at the Old Stone House in Brooklyn, features work by seven contemporary immigrant artists whose practices embrace the folkloric in their own traditions, rituals, and customs by blending elements of their past, memories of “home,” their present, and future. The notion of Folklore underscores the show, how it is often so seamlessly embedded in daily lives that people may tend to overlook it—myths, dances, rhymes, toasts, jokes, holidays, and festivals are all essential characteristics of a community—ranging from the family unit, to a nation, to the global population. The show is on view through April 9, 2023 with a closing event on Monday, April 10th from 6:30pm – 8:00pm.

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David Dempewolf: Between Optics and Daydreams

David Dempewolf, imago 02 (bird’s eye self portrait), 2013 aqueous media and wax pencil on paper, 10” X 14”, courtesy of artist

Most artists’ studios give us a glimpse into their thought and work process but wandering through David Dempewolf’s studio gives more than a glimpse. It is an experience of entering a wonderous world— a hidden niche reveals a station for experimental animation, a corner serves as a station for wood printmaking, a quaint staircase to a small attic leads to imaginative series of drawings, and a “peephole” in a wall further guides our gaze below, to Marginal Utility, the non-for-profit gallery space he runs with his partner and spouse Yuka Yokoyam. It feels like entering a Borgeisan world where the artist’s thoughts and the endless possibilities of “cataloging” entangle and materialize into a new entity in a tangible space.

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